Creating a Content Marketing Culture

For any business, there are two elements that cannot be undermined: content and marketing. Both content and marketing are extremely important for a number of reasons.

However, the greatest reason is that content and marketing the content are the most significant factors when it comes to driving your business’s sales. But, for this strategy to be effective, the content that is marketed needs to of high quality, relevant to the business, and it needs to convey to the consumer useful information.

To truly engage customers with content and marketing, businesses should step up and develop a strong content marketing culture in the workforce. To fully reap the benefits of this system, below are a few tips on how you can establish the quality marketing culture that you need for a successful outcome.

Get the Entire Team on Board

For any successful strategy to take effect in the workplace there needs to be full cooperation from the lowest levels to the highest levels. Therefore, if you’re looking to implement a marketing culture, the first thing that needs to be done is that the upper management needs to be on board.

To achieve this step, a presentation about the benefits of a uniform marketing culture and how it can drive sales is best. When you pitch to upper management, you should educate the executives, indicate how it will give the company a competitive advantage, display strategy, and also present a personalized approach to the marketing strategy.

Develop Guidelines

For any strategy to be successful, there is nothing more important than a set of uniform guidelines that everyone in the office can follow. When there is a disconnect between the content marketing strategy guidelines and what is actually being implemented, then the vision can deteriorate and the end goal may not be reached.

Guidelines should be developed by the core marketing team so that they can present to the entire workforce what the vision is. Once everyone has a shared vision and once everyone understands the guidelines, then the content marketing culture can materialize and lead the company to the end goal.

Processing Through Different Business Functions

Every business has different sectors and a major mistake that most businesses make when it comes to their content marketing culture in the office is that the business thinks that the culture is regulated to one department.

For example, a business will try to keep their content marketing culture within the marketing and content development sector of their business. However, the fact is, content and marketing run through the entire business and there needs to be collaboration between the departments in order for the strategy to be successful.

For instance, the sales department has strong insight about what consumers want and need when it comes to the brand. The information and communications sector of the business may have strong input about how to implement changes that can bring about those needs. Lastly, the content development team is the creative force that conveys the message.

Customer Centric Culture

The purpose of developing a content marketing culture in the office is to ensure that customer’s needs and demands are being met through content and the delivery of that content. For this to be successful, there also needs to be a customer centric culture since the content marketing is essentially for the customer.

To develop a customer centric culture, each department should provide insight on what they can do to promote that culture by using content and marketing strategies.

The Investment in Creativity and Experts

If you’re a small business, then this step may be a bit more of a challenge. When you create a content marketing culture, it can be extremely beneficial to make an investment in experts and their creativity.

To lead the implementation and development of the content marketing culture, you should hire people who have experience in that specific area and who have proven results that are successful and beneficial through driving a business’s sales.

To find the right experts, upper management should definitely reach out to the top professionals in the industry. At the end of the day, if your company doesn’t get the top experts, then someone else will. This will lower your competitive advantage – so act fast.

Strong Lines of Communication

When you have a prevalent content marketing focused workforce, another important factor to take into account is that you also must find a way to ensure that there are strong lines of communication through every aspect of the business.

Content marketing is a creativity driven endeavor and with strong lines of communication, each department is going to be able to provide valuable and relevant input regarding the marketing and the content creation. This input can easily help drive sales and meet customer needs down the line.

Start Simple

While it is certainly important to have a great vision and an idea on how to implement that vision, it does not necessarily follow that you should take large strides in the beginning to achieve that vision. Sometimes, a content marketing culture in the office needs to be something that is achieved in a gradual manner.

By allowing your workforce to follow through by small steps, they can much more easily adapt to the new culture and help the office achieve its content marketing strategy goals. As a result, the point is to start simple and to build from there. Overtime, the implementation can become more significant.

Conclusion

Overall, creating a content marketing culture in your workplace is one of the most beneficial things that you can do for your business, especially when it is in the beginning stages.A content marketing focused workplace means a greater exchange of ideas, better communications between departments, and collaborating on one shared vision.

Figuring out the content marketing strategy may be a challenge at first, but once it takes place, you’ll find that it will do wonders for your business, the marketing, and the consumer engagement that you need for success.

About Sean Donahoe

Sean is one of the most recognized industry leaders in business and marketing. As a popular speaker, author, consultant he has helped over 50,000 students world wide find success in their businesses and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies and businesses of every size grow and thrive...